24. Career Concepts

Concept

Mike Driver and Ken Brousseau at the USC business school developed the notion that people pursue different ideal careers. Not everyone wants to be the chief executive. As they studied this concept, they concluded that there are four naturally occurring career paths or concepts that people seemed to follow. Each of these paths has a different definition of intent and success. They named these patterns the Linear, Expert, Spiral, and Transitory.

The Linear type seeks to be promoted. Success means moving up the organizational ladder. The Expert type seeks to do a good job and has little interest in being promoted. Success is craftsmanship and perfection in execution. Experts include doctors, lawyers, teachers, carpenters, masons, and plumbers. Many Experts, because they do a good job, are seen by Linears to be promotable. In that, the Linears are assuming that everyone is like them, they want to be promoted, and even should want to be promoted. When I ask groups of managers, “How many of you have ever seen an Expert ruined by promotion into management?”—every hand in the room goes up. This is bad for the individual, bad for the company, and bad for the reputation of the manager who promoted him or her. Sadly, it continues to be a common problem.

The Spiral type seeks continuous learning. Spirals will even give up the power and status that Linears desire in order to enhance their learning and growth. The Transitory type have interests other than work and will work as long as they have to in order to pursue their more powerful passions—like sailing around the world, climbing tall mountains, and hiking across continents or on the negative side, alcohol, drugs, gambling, and other vices.

Each of these types make a useful contribution to an organization. Linears (good ones) bring drive, ambition, purpose, and vision. Experts bring talent, expertise, craftsmanship, and execution. Without the Experts, Linears would have no one to lead. Spirals bring new insight, learning, innovation, and change. And Transitories bring, to the enlightened HR manager, a chance to manage economic ups and downs. If they had hired 25 percent of their employees as Transitories, when the next economic downturn and related layoffs came, they could choose those folks to lay off—and they would be happy because they could then sail around the world or go mountain climbing. When the economy turned up again, they would be happy to be rehired.

Tim Hall and others have suggested that a fifth Career Concept is the Warrior. It seems clear that there are people (career military, boxers, mixed martial arts fighters, football players, etc.) who love as General George Patton said, “the sting of battle.” To me, Warriors are a specialized kind of Expert. They seldom want to be promoted, they would rather be in the fray. And they have specialized skills that they hone and rehearse so that in battle, they win.

Although this research is not new, it has been new to virtually every manager I have taught. I hope that you will be aware of these naturally occurring differences in people’s goals and ambitions, and respect them as you make career decisions for yourself and others.

We have developed a short questionnaire to give you a little self-assessment profile of your career concept. Driver and Brousseau distinguished between Career Motives and Career Concepts. In this questionnaire, we just ask you to reflect on your interests. Because you now know the basic scoring for the instrument, your answers are likely to be sub-consciously biased by your VABEs about which Career Concepts are more desirable. Nevertheless, you can take this short instrument if you wish to generate some rough data about your own Career Concept.

http://virginia.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_e8Pdgv8sZERdluQ

Example

After explaining these concepts to one group, a fellow came up after class and asked me, “Why don’t Linears listen?” Hmmm. Tell me more. “Well,” he said, “I have only been to this company for six months. I used to work for one of their major competitors. I’m an engineer, a good engineer. Because I do a good job (Expert type, yes?), my former employers kept assigning me to leadership development programs. I kept telling them, ‘I don’t want to be promoted. I just want to do my job, do it well, and go home to spend time with my family.’ But they didn’t listen. It got so annoying that I quit—and came here. I’ve only been here six months and already they have put me in your fricking leadership development program! Why don’t they listen?” True story.

What’s your answer to this man?

I think it is because most of us especially Linears assume that anyone who does a good job is like them, desirous of moving up. I even had one COO in a client company slam his fist to the table and declare, “Absolutely not! If the janitor here doesn’t aspire to be the CEO, we should fire his ass out of here! That’s the American Dream! You lift yourself up by your bootstraps as high as you can!” Whew! If you were an Expert, a Spiral, or a Transitory working in that organization, how would you feel? Like a second-class citizen, unappreciated for who you are and what you contribute.

I read about a Transitory, a trained RN, whose primary goal was to hike around the world. She would hike as far as she could, until she ran out of money, then go to work (everyone needs more RNs) for a while and then trek off again.

Diagram

We can diagram these four concepts on a grid of power and status on the vertical axis over time on the horizontal axis.

Challenge